The “picture … taken in shadows” thus resists easy assumptions about a portrait’s representational power. In a poem written around the same time as the Lothian portrait was produced, Donne plays on the polysemy of the word “shadow”, and approaches the question of the representation of the self through an imagined work of visual art. “Elegy: His Picture” is the only one of his poems that stages a painting at any length. As such it can certainly be described as an ekphrasis, a verbal representation of a visual work of art.
1 James Heffernan proposes a good working definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of graphic representatation” in “Ekphrasis and Representation”, New Literary History 22. 2 (1991): 297–316 (p. 299). But rather than describing the portrait likeness, as we might expect, the poem goes beyond or beneath the finished surface of the painting to focus instead on the material and painterly process of making a likeness.
“Elegy: His Picture” opens by dramatising the presentation of a portrait gift and its appreciation, and in the first lines a play on the word “shadow” parallels the artwork with the speaker’s death and alerts us to the uncertain status of visual representation:
Here take my picture, though I bid farwell
Thyne in my hart, wher my Soule dwells shall dwell.
T’is like me now, but I dead, t’wilbe more
When we are shadows bothe, then t’was before. (ll. 1-4).
2 Quotations from “His Picture” are from Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 2: Elegies, p. 264. The basic pun – that shadow can mean both “portrait” and “ghost” – parallels the picture and the moment of death in a number of ways. Once dead, the speaker of the poem will be more like his portrait than he was alive. “Shadow” implies a comparison on grounds of insubstantiality: both a portrait and a ghost are insubstantial “copies”, counterfeits, of the original man,
3 OED shadow n. 6b; see also Claire Pace, “‘Delineated Lives’: themes and variations in seventeenth-century poems about portraits”, Word and Image 2.1 (1986): 1–17 (p. 6). and may also recall the sense of “shadow” as “actor”: “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” (
Macbeth V.5.24–25).
But “shadow” also has the very material denotation of the act of painting: in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries “to shadow” may mean simply to paint or to draw.
4 See OED shadow v. 8. and Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620 (Leamington Spa: James Hall, 1981), p. 19. “Shadow” may also carry the more technically precise meaning of an underdrawing, the bottom layer or rough draft of a painting, echoing the Italian
adumbratio.
5 See Gent, Picture and Poetry, p. 19. Due to the paucity of artistic vocabulary in English, as Lucy Gent has shown, the word “shadow” has multiple possible meanings when used in the context of visual art. As well as describing these well-established painterly techniques the word is also associated with the very new (in the late sixteenth century) painterly use of shadow, of
chiaroscuro creating the illusion of depth, which, along with perspective, was beginning to be recognised as “one of the chief means of achieving a greater illusion of reality”.
6 Pace, “Delineated Lives”, p. 6; cf. Gent, Picture and Poetry, p. 26. Fifteen ninety-six (the probable date for this poem)
7 See Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 2: Elegies, pp. 820–821. is quite early for “shadow” to have this sense – but given the existence of the Lothian portrait, dated one year earlier, we know that Donne in this period was aware of painting making use of shadows. The technique itself is considered to be rare for such an early date, when an “unshadow’d” style was still more popular.
8 Pace, “Delineated Lives”, p. 6. Many years later, in a sermon preached at Whitehall in February 1628, Donne once again demonstrates his technical knowledge of artistic technique and the metaphorical potential of the word “shadow” when he compares the “dying man, that dies in Christ” with a picture printed from a copper engraving:
Bee pleased to remember that those Pictures which are deliver’d in a minute, from a print upon a paper, had many dayes, weeks, Moneths time for the graving of those Pictures in the Copper; So this Picture of that dying Man, that dies in Christ … was graving all his life; All his publique actions were the lights, and all his private the shadowes of this Picture. And when this Picture comes to the Presse, this Man to the streights and agonies of Death, thus he lies, thus he looks, this he is. (8: 190)
Donne’s evident technical knowledge of engraving and the production of prints furnishes him with metaphors to describe man’s relationship to mortality: the actions of a man’s life are compared to the long-drawn-out creative process of engraving the copper, while the actual picture is the final product. At the end of his life a man becomes the print, that static, unchangeable result, in a logic that parallels the “when we are shadows both” metaphor in the Elegy.
Donne’s knowledge of painterly technique allows all these secondary meanings of “shadow” to hover in “His Picture”, even if the primary sense can be taken as that of “portrait” or “copy”. But the pun depends on the idea that the copy is simultaneously material and immaterial. The dead man and the picture are not only compared because they will be similarly insubstantial; paradoxically, when they are “shadows bothe” they will be paralleled in substance. The body of the poem’s speaker, which has become “foule and course” (l. 12), separated into different layers, parallels the material construction of the picture.
This elegy has attracted a good number of biographical readings, as have many of the other valediction poems. From a fairly early date in modern Donne criticism, the voyage on which the speaker is departing has been linked to one of Donne’s own sea-voyages, most likely to Cadiz with Essex in 1596.
9 Edward Dowden, “The Poetry of John Donne”, The Fortnightly Review 47 (1890): 791–808 (p. 801). The dating of the poem seems to be largely based on that biographical assumption.
10 Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 2: Elegies, pp. 820–821 and pp. lxi–lxvii. And, perhaps inevitably, this biographical reading extends to a desire to link the “picture” to a specific material portrait of Donne himself. Given that the estimated dating of the poem to 1596 coincides so neatly with the 1595 date attributed to the Lothian portrait, it is perhaps surprising that critics have not in general attempted to identify “His Picture” with Donne’s “picture taken in shadows”. This may simply be because, as Helen Gardner says in her edition of the
Elegies, the Lothian portrait “is hardly the size to hand to a lady”,
11 Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne. The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 143. but equally, the critical desire to find an actual portrait predates the 1959 rediscovery of the Lothian portrait. In a tradition which apparently begins with E. K. Chambers’ edition
The Poems of John Donne, the elegy has instead been identified with the Marshall engraving.
12 E. K. Chambers, ed., The Poems of John Donne (London: Lawrence and Bullen; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1896), I, p. 237; see also Gardner, ed., Elegies, p. 143; Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, pp. 52–53. There is no particular reason why the elegy shouldn’t be linked to the Marshall image, but also no particular reason why it should. Most critics concur that the scene set up in the first line of the elegy evokes the convention of the departing lover presenting his beloved with a portrait miniature.
13 Bryson, “Lost Portrait”, p. 15; Gardner, ed., Elegies, p. 143. If one were tempted to see this as more than a literary device and to search for a physical portrait, then the martial stance of the young Donne in the Marshall engraving provides, as Ann Hollinshead Hurley puts it, “an appropriate anticipatory, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the young lover of ‘His Picture’ whose inner being is characterized as ‘faire and delicate’”.
14 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 53. Hurley combines the traditional juxtaposition of “His Picture” with the Marshall portrait with the hypothesis of the lost Hilliard original in order to parallel “His Picture”, “Hilliard’s portrait of Donne” and Hilliard’s treatise “On the Art of Limning”, reading all three as attempts to problematise the nature of representation (pp. 53–60). Nonetheless, the identification of the Marshall engraving with “my picture” in the Elegy under discussion remains problematic, and not only because of the biographical fallacy involved in such an assumption. The very idea that we might find a physical companion image to Donne’s Elegy is highly ironic because what Donne goes on to do in this poem is to problematise representation and strip down the image of the man to its constituent elements.
Various critics over the years have suggested that Donne offers us two “pictures” in the Elegy: first “my picture” offered by the speaker to his lover as he departs for war, which is not described to us, beyond perhaps what is implied in the phrase “faire or delicate” (l. 17). Second, there is “another picture”,
15 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1947), p. 54. the verbal image we are given in lines 5–10 of the returning soldier, battle-scarred and sunburned:
16 Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, p. 54; John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 51; Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 128.When weatherbeaten I come back; my hand
Perchance with rude Oares torne, or Suns beams tand,
My face and breast of hayre cloth, and my head
With Cares rash sodain horines orespread,
My body a sack of bones, broken within
And powders blew staines scatterd on my skin … (ll. 5–10)
An offshoot argument to the notion of the two pictures is that the image of the “sun-tanned, blue-stained returning warrior” is more “attractive”, his “bristles, rough hands, and … other craggy features” more “appetising to women”, as John Carey puts it, than was the original picture.
17 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 59; Carey, John Donne, p. 52. Yet attractive as the notion of this sunburned soldier may be, the “returning warrior” description, far from giving us an image of a whole man, is fragmented, in more ways than one.
These lines provide us with a blazon of the speaker’s body, and this in itself could be seen as a verbal portrait, since in his
Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham describes the poetic blazon as the prime example of “
Icon, or resemblance by imagerie or pourtrait, alluding to the painters terme”.
18 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: Contrived into three Bookes: The first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament (London: Richard Field, 1589), p. 204. However while Puttenham specifies that the poet should “resemble every part of [the] body to some naturall thing of excellent perfection in his kind”, in the Elegy the speaker’s body is paralleled with rough materials and images of disintegration. Rather than itemising the body in order to represent the whole, this blazon insists on fragmentation, presenting us with a body “torne” (l. 6), a man reduced to a roughened hand and chest, a hoary head and finally a “sack of bones, broken within” (l. 9).
Donne’s play with tropes of similitude here opens out into a larger commentary on the notion of verisimilitude in general. The poetic convention of the immortalising portrait, that “the painted image will survive, while the actual physical appearance of the sitter decays”
19 Pace, “Delineated Lives”, p. 3. can be seen, for example, in Thomas Randolph’s “Upon his picture” (1638), in which the speaker contemplates the portrait of his younger self at the moment when “death displays his coldness in my cheek, / And I myself in my own picture seek, / Not finding what I am, but what I was” (ll. 5–7).
20 See Philip McCaffrey, “Painting the Shadow: (Self-)Portraits in Seventeenth Century Poetry”, in The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts from the Renaissance to the Present, ed by Amy Golahny. (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 1996), pp. 179–195 (pp. 181–182). Donne pays lip service to this trope with the line “This [the portrait] shall say what I was” (l. 13), but in contrast to Randolph’s more conventional poem, in Donne’s it is precisely in the coldness of death that the speaker will be most “like” the portrait. Donne’s defining “shadow” pun insists on a rethinking of the
likeness of sitter and portrait: “T’is like me now, but I dead, t’wilbe more / When we are shadows bothe, then t’was before” (ll. 3–4).
Thomas Docherty is the most insistent of the critics who read the “weatherbeaten” speaker of lines 5–10 as “another, entirely dissimilar, portrait” in which “Donne” is “
changed” and the subject of the portrait “becomes, finally, unnameable, unidentifiable”.
21 Docherty, John Donne, Undone, p. 126. While I agree – up to a point – with Docherty, that this poem is in many ways about the impossibility of representation, I disagree with his insistence that there are “(at least) two pictures” and particularly with the idea that “there is no identity between the picture[s]”.
22 Docherty, John Donne, Undone, p. 128. Rather than offering a “second picture” in these lines, I would argue that Donne goes beyond – or beneath – the surface of one portrait in order to explore the physical processes by which the image, and the man, are constituted. The fragmenting blazon
of lines 5 to 10 applies not only to the man but also to the picture:
his picture too is reduced to the materials required for pictorial representation: the cloth, the white base, the crushed bone and blue powder that make up pigments.
“Powders blew stains scatterd on my skin” in line 10 retains, of course, the sense of gunpowder on the returning sailor,
23 John Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (Garden City, NY: Anchor, Doubleday, 1967), p. 64; A. J. Smith, John Donne: The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 419. but in the context of a discussion of a painted portrait, “powders blew staines” also strongly suggests the mixing of paint from powdered lapis lazuli or azurite. Hurley proposes something similar in her analysis of the elegy, suggesting that “the actual craft of making miniatures may well have been in his mind … when he refers to the ‘blew staines’ of gunpowder … prompting his audience to recall the familiar blue background of the idealizing portrait miniature”.
24 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 173. Such an interpretation is reinforced by the other physical details enumerated in lines 5–10, all of which are open to a similar double reading. The “hayre clothe” of the soldier’s roughened skin has echoes of the painter’s cloth – a term commonly used to refer to painters’ canvas in the sixteenth century, for example in Richard Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo’s
Trattato.
25 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Caruinge Buildinge Written first in Italian … and Englished by R [ichard] H [aydock] (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1598), p. 6; p. 23. Although haircloth is not a traditional support for oil painting, it is a stiff woven cloth not unlike canvas. The addition of “hayre” emphasises the roughness of the material and highlights the parallels between body and painting, while simultaneously evoking the hair shirt of the penitent, humbled man.
26 C. A. Patrides, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London: J. M. Dent, 1985), p. 14. Moreover, the “horines orespred” could refer not only to a new crop of white hairs on the care-worn head but also to the white layer of binder, chalk and pigment called “
gesso” spread over the canvas to prepare it for the application of oil paints. Pursuing this interpretation, “My body a sack of bones, broken within” (l. 9) could refer to the use of crushed bones in making pigment – particularly the black known as “bone black” made from the powder of charred bones burned at a high temperature.
27 The “Suns beams” too fit into this reading, as Italian painters exposed freshly painted oil pictures to the sun after each layer was added, “to remove by evaporation the yellow coat of oil which always rose to the surface, and which if not removed by this process darkened the colours”, Mary Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting [1849] (New York: Dover, 1967), I, p. cccvii. The National Portrait Gallery’s recent conservation research into the Lothian portrait reveals that it does contain the pigment bone black, particularly in the sleeve on the right.
28 National Portrait Gallery – Conservation Research – NPG 6790; John Donne http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitConservation/mw111844/John-Donne#paintsamplingThe conviction of the National Portrait Gallery curators that Donne must have been actively involved in the “orchestration” of the Lothian portrait suggests that he would have been aware of the details surrounding the material production of an oil painting, including the somewhat gruesome process required to produce a painting’s colours. Not only may the “sack of bones” in the Elegy refer – at least in part – to the material production of the painting’s “shadows”, but other details that have emerged during the restoration of the Lothian portrait may also correspond to the poem. The examination of its layers has revealed not only substantial traces of bone black but also the preparation layers of a “thick chalk ground and a relatively substantial priming containing lead white” which may imply that Donne had some knowledge of the priming process and which could be connected to the “horines orespred”.
29 National Portrait Gallery – Conservation Research – NPG 6790; John Donne http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitConservation/mw111844/John-Donne#paintsampling.I am not using the Lothian portrait to make yet another identification of “His Picture” with an actual work of art. The picture in the poem stripped back to its constituent layers is emphatically
not the Lothian portrait, especially as this is painted on panel rather than cloth.
30 Although most surviving English portraits from the sixteenth century are on panel rather than canvas, the earliest portrait on canvas examined in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Making Art in Tudor Britain” project dates from 1546, and many English people in the period owned painted cloths depicting a range of subjects. Charlotte Bolland, Project Curator (Making Art in Tudor Britain), personal communication. In fact it does not really bear resemblance to any of the extant portraits of Donne – or to any completed artwork. The “shadows both” pun may, in part, parallel the elegy with the metaphor of the dying man as a finished work of art developed in the 1628 sermon: “when this Picture comes to the Presse, this Man to the streights and agonies of Death, thus he lies, thus he looks, this he is” (8: 190). Yet “His Picture” is barely concerned with how the speaker looks, or with the “fair or delicate” finished product (l. 17), but rather with the “foule and course” process (l. 12) required to produce a painting.
Donne’s insistence on the materials that go into the making of the picture demonstrate his interest in process and in the painter’s practice of his craft, and is in keeping with his general attention to making rather than to “made work”. Such a material and painterly ekphrasis of a work of visual art is in keeping with the long tradition of verbal representation of visual representation, whose
locus classicus is the description of Achilles’ shield in the
Iliad Book 18, ll. 478–608. As Lessing famously observes in his
Laocoon, Homer “does not paint the shield as finished and complete, but as a shield that is being made”.
31 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1962), p. 95. Homer’s ekphrasis of the shield insists on the difference between what is represented and the medium of representation.
32 See Heffernan, “Ekphrasis”, p. 301. And yet despite all Donne’s evident interest in painterly creation, the effect of “His Picture” is less a mimicking of the creative process than a process of excavation, a peeling back of the layers. The elegy begins by appearing to proffer a “picture” but proceeds to undo the possibility of knowing a person through a portrait – or through their surface appearance – by taking the picture apart and showing the layers that go into its composition. In a sermon preached one Whitsunday at Lincoln’s Inn, Donne compares the practice of the painter and the printer, and describes the painter who “makes an eye, and an eare, and a lip, and passes his pencill an hundred times over every muscle, and every haire, and so in many sittings makes up one man” (5: 38). In “His Picture”, the effect is rather the opposite – one man (who at the beginning of the poem we assume we know, from literary convention or the traditional association with the poet) is unmade.
Donne’s progressive deconstruction of the trope of the portrait gift thus raises questions about the material status of the painting, the nature of representation, and in particular the possibility of representing the self. In the second part of “His Picture”, in parallel with the unmaking of the self I have been describing, the speaker slips out of the picture frame and becomes the connoisseur. Through both the portrait gift and the disintegrating blazon of his body, the poem has constructed the speaker as an object to be gazed at. But in the second half he shifts speaking positions to put words in his mistress’s mouth:
This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say,
Do his hurts reache mee? doth my worth decay?
Or do they reach his judging mind, that he
Should like and love les, what he did love to see? (ll. 13–16)
The conventional notion, that the portrait represents him as he was, is complicated by the way his lover’s words construct him as a viewing, “judging mind”, rather than the object of the painting. Paradoxically, when he is “speaking” in lines 1–13, he is the object of other people’s gaze; when the words are supposedly those of his lover, he becomes a judging subject. The portrait is taken apart and reduced to its constituent layers; and simultaneously, Donne presents us with a sitter who does not remain fixed, as an object to be looked at, but escapes from the picture to become a viewing subject.